February 18, 2024

first Sunday of Lent

by Fr. Boniface Endorf, OP

Dear St. Joseph Parish Family,

Our Winter Thomistic Institute series concludes this Friday with a great talk. Professor Thomas Hibbs will speak about “Loneliness and Friendship: Aquinas’s Cure for What Ails our Soul.” The talk starts at 7pm this Friday, the doors open at 6:30. 

This Monday the friars are starting a new ministry called Dominican Discourse. A friar will speak for about 15 minutes about a topic that interests him and is related to our Faith, followed by a discussion of the topic. It will meet every Monday, starting this Monday, at 7:30pm in McGuire Hall, and will conclude at 8:30. It’s open to everyone so I hope to see you there.

Now that Lent has begun, we’ll host Stations of the Cross every Friday in Lent at 7pm in the church.

Mass Tidbit:

The Our Father concludes with “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Here we pray that God will not allow us to be tempted beyond our ability to resist. It’s not that God directly tempts us to sin—God never desires sin—but that we not fall to the temptations encountered in this fallen world. We desire to be delivered from all evil; a hope that is fully realized in heaven. 

You may have heard Protestants end the Our Father with “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever.” That line is not a part of the Our Father, but was included in some old Bible manuscripts because it was said in the Mass and made its way into some versions of the Bible, but it is not original to the Gospels and not included in any Catholic Bible. However, this verse remains in the Mass to this day, as we will see next week.  

God Bless,
Fr. Boniface